April 13: Amy Clampitt’s “Green”

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8 Responses to “April 13: Amy Clampitt’s “Green””

1. June Calender says:

   April 13, 2011 at 9:26 am

   I have been walking near bogs and marshes all winter. This poem says brilliantly what I have seen and had inadequate words to describe — this is one o the reasons I read poetry.
2. Lazarus says:

   April 13, 2011 at 10:55 am

   This is beautiful. The heart breaks. Here is my favorite stanza. The red that comes first is often missed. The internal rhyme in: gore/ no more so enchanting:

   The woods are full of this, the red
   of an anticipated
   afterglow that’s (as it were) begun
   in gore, green that no more than
3. Melvin Rosenberg says:

   April 13, 2011 at 11:49 am

   This one, this rhapsodic enchantment will need days, will need twenty readings, will need long periods of meditating on, before a cogent comment is possible. For now only, it a magnificent lyric that echoes into into my very being.
4. R. L. Lyons says:

   April 13, 2011 at 1:44 pm

   Amy Clampitt’s poem “Green,” as in so many poems of depth, illustrates the profundity of a poet’s vision.

   This poem’s allusions beckon us in thought and reflection to consider, it and hopefully others of its intensity, the entire cycle of a human life.

   The “ambivalence” of youth gives hints in overtones of what lies ahead.

   She talks of middle age in metaphors such as, “halfway autumnal” and maturing like a “rowan, ” or ” shadblow ” standing, tall and aloof like solitary trees. We might think of establishing oneself as a beacon, helping and lighting the way for other lives, as with a burning “cresset.”

   Then in maturity, we eschew our foibles, by basking in one’s “afterglow” and the illusions, with which we surround ourselves. And, as old age approaches we hold tight to our springs, summers and even autumns as in the phrases, “Petals fall” and ” leaves hang on.”

   Finally, resting gently down in death, with the phrase, “the drifting, then the lying still.” invokes reflections of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and his last lines:
   “…The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
   But I have promises to keep,
   And miles to go before I sleep…”

   Thank you Amy.

   R.L.L.
5. R. L. Lyons says:

   April 13, 2011 at 1:53 pm

   Understanding a poem doesn’t take too long, Mr. Rosenberg; only a lifetime; a mere fraction of eternity. But what a joy, that infinitude.

   R.L.L.
6. Wayne Boyce says:

   April 13, 2011 at 4:35 pm

   “How strange,” I thought, when first I heard you say
   there was a time in spring that you held dear,
   No month nor week, but just a special day,
   No certain date, but still, it came each year
   when fresh turned earth earth made Springtime redolent.
   Then Dirt Day came as tractors plowed the soil.
   A year or more, the land had held that scent
   then loosed by Spring’s soft warmth and farmers’ toil.
   I must have smelled that smell a score or more
   of times and paid no heed to it at all.
   That gift you drew out from your wondrous store
   of teaching gifts to me, I still recall.
   You showed me how to look and be aware
   of common things near us, but yet so rare.

   Wayne Boyce
   ew.boyce@att.net
7. Robert Champ says:

   April 13, 2011 at 7:16 pm

   I haven’t read many Amy Clampitt poems, but this one may change that. This poem is absolutely lovely.
8. Mary Swope says:

   April 13, 2011 at 10:43 pm

   What a beautiful poem! Like the picture it invokes, this poem is a many-layered — multileaved, one might say — creation. At first, I noticed the intensely observed phenonmenon of what seems like a birth but in so many ways looks like a death — the bloody business of spring that shows, as the poet observes, before the green. What wonderful mouthfuls of words, so many specific and unusual nouns, like cresset — even rowan! ” The whiff, the rime, the dulcet/ powdering. just now, of bloom. . .” But then the form becomes clear, the pattern of rhymed couplets; some you can’t really hear but only see (all/chlorophyll), others are echoed later in the poem, and then the final tercet at the end, with the strong end rhyme of “still” with chlorophyll, in addition to the internal rhymes that make the effort of exact description all the more intense. This is a very formal verse form, though I’m not sure which one — yet it is almost unnoticeable at first reading, masterfully effective because it serves a purpose that is more than a musical one. It increases the intensity of observation, which leads the reader to understand that the poet sees the “gore” in the birth of the bog, snow and rime in the ‘whiff’ of blossom; she is noticing that one is part of the other, and that the ‘green’ does not last long, although the leaves last all summer because they have a job to do, to stay alive. But in the end, there is the “lying still.” The poet’s observing eye sees the bog in early spring but sees it through a mind contemplating, perhaps fixed on, death. Thank you for this poem!